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Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Personal rules that I broke while writing Welcome to Envy Park

Welcome to Envy Park is my new chick lit/contemporary romance novella. I "let go" of it last night, meaning I wrote "The End", re-read some parts and made minor edits, and then said it was done. Done!This was written so differently from everything else I've come up with. I broke a lot of my own writing rules, such as:

1. Don't rush.
I wasn't even planning to write a contemporary romance this year. I wasn't! But I finished that YA/NA fantasy romance novella in record time, so I might as well start on this project while I had the time. And then when I started writing it, I couldn't stop -- nearly every time I sat down to write, a thousand words would come out. I think I found the right motivation and method finally.

2. Don't let people read early chapters if it's not finished yet.
The first 10,000 words or so of the book are already up on Wattpad and Figment. I normally don't do this, because I have a thing about planting everything in the first act. If for any reason my ending changes, I usually go back and re-do my first few chapters. I'm happy to report though that any changes to my outline happened in the middle, in the parts that no one has seen, so the published book version of Welcome to Envy Park shouldn't be that much different from what's up on Wattpad.

3. Don't introduce too many characters.
This was a rule I imposed just because I write short novels, and too many characters would inflate the story unnecessarily. But strangely enough this story needed people, so I kept adding them.

There's another personal writing rule I broke (regarding certain types of adult scenes) that I'll reflect on when people have actually edited/commented/read those, because no one has just yet. I'm sure I will have more to learn and discover when they do.

Welcome to Envy Park will be published on Amazon soon. Thank you for being part of this!